Two Eyes Cenote sixty-fifth

quick one-off after the party begins to subside, vague about timelines <3

kohl, wiped from eyes shadowed in tiredness.

a thousand words said. a hundred smiles given. song. dance. adulation.

senmut's mask fell as he turned away from his reflection. but he could not sleep. the party went on and he was still erpa-ha. 

slowly he began to pack, not for his trip as he had wanted, but for a return to akashingo where business might still be managed. "please ask @Eset if she will see me, at her leisure." she was hebsut. she was respected.

senmut sank down onto his pillowy bed and cradled head in arms, thinking only, only of nazli.

<3

She had known it was coming. It still pained her unspeakably to see his things spread out across the floor.

The silence of his chamber is deafening as the hebsut enters. Then she sees him upon his bed- in a way he has never been before.

Defeated.

“Erpa-ha?” her steps abruptly abate. She raises a hand where it lingers in the air above his shoulder.

“Senmut,” she breathes, "you're hurting-"

eset was there, and a moment more, and senmut all but asked for her touch.

his eyes rose in a wordless plea; he shut them, tightly, and pasted something like a smile to the outer edges of his mouth. "when the gods move, they leave Their priests with — much to hold." and it was no lie.

his brush to her elbow was brief, a half-embrace. "when we leave here, your work is not over, and will not be until pharaoh and Consort return to akashingo. so i am not traveling, not yet. only going back to the palace."

he wanted to tell her of trade, of what they had accomplished. of alliance. but senmut found that his voice was at its end, and his heart a millstone in his chest.

Even so cursory a touch flares like Zaahira’s insistence. Like the warrior in the pass. When he rises, she sets a reflexive step between them.

She nods stiffly, “I will oversee things here. Pharaoh will be safe in your absence, Erpa-ha. My word to you, and the gods.”

She wants to ask more- why he guards himself.

“There is stock in the scullery. Boar, hare. I will prepare it for your travels.”

She does not think he should be traveling alone.

"thank you, hebsut. the gods chose well when they put muat-riya in your power."

his words were genuine. the idea of eating filled his mouth with the taste of dust. "will you — maybe, ah, eset," fumbling as he rarely did. "will you send me a report, in your own time, of what is happening here? i am not certain when i will return."

the brilliant eyes thrummed with anguish. senmut wanted to beg for word of nazli in specific. "in return," the prince said hoarsely, trying to cling to business, "i will send you one of the court and its intrigues. i hope you will return for any births in the new year. such a monumental event could not go smoothly without you, eset."

There are lines of fatigue in his face. She had not forgotten what Toula had spoken of; that his heart belonged to Nazli.

“A full report- on everyone,” she allows the last to enunciate.

Take her with you - why must he part from her?

She will not question him. She finds her head nodding. “I will attend the births. I will be wherever Pharaoh has need for me.”

the laughter of guests went on. senmut did not want to be alone, not until he must; he drew a breath. "will you drink with me to the health of pharaoh and her consort?" the erpa-ha asked, trying to keep the hopeful note from a voice which he had only just steadied.

on everyone; the corners of his eyes tightened in recognition and he turned away before he wept again.

why was this so difficult? he had asked nazli here for the ceremonies; he had never expected to stay. his place was akashingo. and hers — why should it be that the palace always followed her? 

a rest, too, for her. from them. from him. 

wine, placed. a servant disappeared as soon as they had come. senmut wanted the burn of it in his throat, the quick headiness to quell an aching mind.

"to the Serpent Pharaoh on the Horus Throne."

Eset will not hurry herself to return to the feast. Not when the Erpa-ha wore such anguish.

Senmut. Nazli. Tavina. Zaahira.

Love; scorned.

What she had learned of Akashingo was that this was no place for it.

She took the berry into her mouth and she did pray; prayed for the gods not to burn her Pharaoh, as they had their mortals.

a boy, lifted from nothing. a boy born from rich earth beside a slow sea. a boy who would have been content to stay, to marry, to work and die where he had been given life.

but the gods. they move in ways no one can predict.

and now he stood here, princemade and royal, gilded in riches with the finest vintage pooling with fire in his mouth.

and it was sweet, and it was good. he took another, and toyed with a third;

"i was always meant to be fellahin, eset. often i wish for something less than what i have been given. or something more." berry to lips, the radiance gone out of his green eyes. "but now i am in a position to give more than i will ever possess." a dichotomy.

"i am sorry, hebsut. i do not mean to keep you."

“You keep me only from drunken company. And since that is the case- I prefer your’s.” She means it in jest, but no smile comes to her lips. This feels somehow appalling to her, sitting across the man who would have been her Pharaoh, acting as if she were his equal.

So in ways, she understood him perfectly.

How fickle and superficial her attempts at grandeur- but Senmut, he was a high priest of the Gods. Why should he be condemned to float over life like a spirit?

She stares at the berries. For a moment, and only because the Erpa-ha had deemed it suitable, she lifts a second and looks into its crimson gloss.

“What scares you, Erpa-ha?” She has the nerve to ask him.

but she was his equal, he felt it.

like nazli; all three of them elevated from peasantry into more.

"your company is the only i could possibly have handled tonight at this hour," he said quietly, not quite answering for the rejoinder had not come.

"i am afraid of failure. failing the gods. failing pharaoh. failing — simply failure, in all its ways. once you have seen yourself fail, you will see it a thousand times again."

something eased in his chest.

“Is it avoidable?” She asks just before setting the second upon her tongue. Almost instantaneously the worry in her mind dulls, blissfully unstructured.

“If they are not your failures, they will be someone else’s to live with.”

As Eset understood it, any thing worth pursuing involved a constant willingness to go to war. Endlessly.

"the more power you possess, the less avoidable it becomes." another berry, its power in his veins; for a moment it felt as if meeting her eyes was safer, and so senmut allowed himself a second of connection.

"i would rather they were mine." the space between them had become warm and companionable, and not for the first time did senmut wonder at eset beneath the veneer of her rank and station.

She longs to offer him comforts, but finds she does not know which words to soothe him even as the wine loosens her tongue. The hebsut feels only that she thinks a great deal of Senmut; sees him not for his failures, but for his resolve.

She envisions Toula’s portrait; the portrayal of hope on the wall. How had they both come to be this way- subdued?

“If tomorrow you are to fail- would you rewrite all of this?” The ask, she realizes, is as much for herself. She needed to know his answer- she might have her’s then, too.

rewrite. to have again a life, a future, which stretched before him as not only open but his to control.

"my mother aahmose had ten children and forgot none of us. my father pihuri was just as pleased to see a girl child as he was for a boy. we lived with very little but i remember many smiles."

another berry. why not?

"my father became ill and could no longer work as he once did. my mother could not feed us all. i was her youngest. she sang to me when she carried me to the temple but i saw tears upon her face. and before she gave me to the priests, she knelt down and kissed my head. 'now, senmut. the gods have given you a chance to be greater than your father and your mother. each choice you make now must be deliberate.'"

and so it had been. and so each step had brought him to this moment.

his choices had brought him to her.

"i would change nothing, eset." the wine had gone to his head; senmut was sinking down against small piles of fine pelts, fine gifts; a small disk of bone rolled free and toward the feet of the hebsut. another offering for nazli, this time for her status as priestess. once he had finished it.

She listens to the story of two selfless parents and what they gave their son even when it broke them to do so: a chance for life. Her eyes over him blur and she blinks before her body can make anything more of it.

“Your mother and father were brave to know when to make that sacrifice.”

But now it is Senmut who carries the hopes and dreams of his lineage. He must; an alternative philosophy he cannot afford to have. It is the common denominator of the servant.

He settles now like ash upon his furs. The hebsut returns the loose bone to a shelf and looks down dizzily at the berries. They entice her but they taste of future sin.

She would instead go down to the kitchens and prepare his things for the return to Akashingo, but not before hesitating outside the door. Her eyes find where he lays over her shoulder.

“I pray you will continue to feel this way, Erpa-ha,” there is some finality puncturing the hush of her voice.

You are making a mistake.

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perhaps he was.

"they gave me a life where i would never have to make that choice myself." his voice was sodden with drink and now in ancient, longheld pain.

eset had a message for him. senmut received its transmission even if he could not parse it now. he wondered if she knew. he wondered if nazli had confided in the hebsut.

he hoped for this; he hoped she did not carry these things alone.

senmut had failed.

"i wish the same. thank you, eset." 

and when she had gone, senmut took the circlet of bone and rolled it over and over in his paw until tears made it slick and it threatened to fall again. she would come to akashingo if he asked but he could not ask, for fear she would heed any uttered word. it was how she had been shaped. molded. senmut could never be sure, and had she not already suffered a thousand commands?

priestess of Nwt in muat-riya, away from the palace, the memories of ramesses, the — the rooms in which she had been brought to such anguish after.

knowing how she had wept, had cried, not only for herself but for pharaoh; senmut lay among his things and stared unseeingly upward, allowing the memories to flood until he was tormented; nazli summoned to ramesses; her confusion, her bitter tears. how her body had changed in evil ways, and how finally that had been enough to kindle makono's wrath.

but nazli had still been in agony of mind and body, had she not? until tavina and nala had put her into a long slumber, and upon waking, upon the death of the man who had done this, her life had been irreparably changed.

and senmut had known! and he had not stopped it; he had not confronted the royal man; he had —

meandering now, the thought of how ramesses too had stolen his first interlude; his virginity had been a performance for ramesses and treva. was that why he had seen nothing wrong beyond discomfort when ramesses had made a second choice of a similar nature? and yet it had been vastly different.

nazli, nazli, love mingled with guilt so sharp that abruptly senmut jerked himself to one side and vomited upon the polished floor, a sob on his lips as blackness gratefully embraced him for a long while.